


Phantom Pains

by unholygrass



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Chronic Pain, Cuddling, M/M, Markus whump, Phantom pain, Post-Pacifist Best Ending (Detroit: Become Human), Started as a drabble, connor is a good boyfriend, hurt!markus, realistic couple, running loose and wild with the technology terms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-28 11:46:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17182388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unholygrass/pseuds/unholygrass
Summary: Markus struggles with phantom pain from his junkyard bio components and tries to deal with the chronic pain. Connor helps take some of the load off of him.A prompt from tumblr that was meant to be a drabble and then all of a sudden wasn't.





	Phantom Pains

**Author's Note:**

> THIS comes from Tumblr from Deviant900 who sent me this lovely prompt and then I didn't reply to them for over a week. It was meant to be a drabble but its such a good concept and I just loved writing it a bunch and then this whole thing came out?? Idk It got a little (a lot) off track but it was fun and I figured I'd share. Here is that post-- https://cownnor.tumblr.com/post/181453265982/one-of-my-headcanons-markus-gets-the-android

At first Markus doesn’t know what has brought him out of stasis. His programs are only partially done decluttering and his chronometer tells him its only 2 AM— far too early to be up and about. He glances around the room to look for a disturbance, a frown tugging at his lips. The streets are no louder than usual, and the bedroom is quiet. Connor lies beside him, face relaxed and LED spinning a soft blue. He has one arm thrown across Markus’s waist, his unconscious need to be touching shining through even during his sleep cycle.

No disturbance found, he reassesses himself.

His systems are running far hotter than normal, and his energy consumption is operating three points above his set parameters. He’s only just woken up and his body is already running itself as though he’s about to set in front of a moving car, his joints beginning to tense and muscles pulling tight. It takes him a moment, but he recognizes what is coming.

He should move— go to the couch where he won’t disrupt Connor, but just as he attempts to slip out from Connor’s grip he’s bombarded by sixteen errors stabbing into the back of his eye, sharp and biting, and it takes all of his processing power not to cry out in the silence of the bedroom. He twists onto his back before sitting up fully, hand coming up to press his palm against his eye socket. The sensation remains, pulsing forcefully against his chassis and making his entire body feel too hot and cold at the same time.

If he were human he’d fear he’d be ill, but as an android he knows he won’t be. It’s only incomplete signals competing with each other for a status query, scrambled code coming undone as his body struggled to decipher the origins of biocomponents that aren’t his own. The pieces he’d stolen in the junkyard were functional, but once in a blue moon they send out a string of mutated code in reaction to being forced to convert local signals back into binary.

It’s a lack of compatibility. It only happens when his body is too scarce on resources— when he’s worked himself too far and not left anything for the stolen pieces to use in their converting.

He’d been careful— he’d been taking breaks and keeping an eye on his parameters, topped off with fresh thirium and even de-fraged every night, but it hadn’t been enough—

He curses softly as his kneecap begins to throb lowly in time with his eye. He knew what was happening to his body. He knew that it was merely a barrage of corrupted command sequences, and yet it’s the closest thing to pain he can describe. The code is overwhelmingly negative and invasive and fuck him if it doesn't  _ hurt.  _ He’s an android, but based on how humans reacted to pain, and how he was reacting now, he had to come to the conclusion months ago the phantom code burning along his joints and behind his face is pain.

There’s not much to be done for it other than to wait for the code to process and dissipate within itself, but that is little comfort against the bombardment of corrupted binary drumming against his insides. It’s the third time it’s happened, and he’s yet to find a working way to cope with it.

He curls further in on himself, legs falling off the side of the bed as he pressed the heel of his hand against his eye socket fiercely— the errors thrown from the pressure sensors were more bearable than the incompatibility glitches. He feels the plasteel bend under the pressure— he’s being careless— not controlling his own strength— there’s a chance he could break the plating, but—

A strong hand wraps around the one against his face and peels it away before he can do any real damage, cool fingers intertwining with his and keeping a tight grip on him.

He felt Connor’s lithe body press against his back as he draped himself over Markus’s hunched form carefully, free arm coming up to wrap around his chest and splay a hand across Markus’s collarbone. He felt the skin on Connor’s hand quickly recede as their interface opened, Connor’s consciousness melting into his own.

Within seconds the pain lessened as Connor’s presence smothered it, his own advanced processors lending resources into Markus’s systems as to take the load off of his incompatible parts. Markus can only watch as Connor’s core processors slipped into his scrambled code and tackled it with a vengeance, swallowing up the mess that swam inside his head and taking it on as its own.

“Con—” He makes a weak protest, hand coming up to grip at where Connor’s arm was wrapped around him. Connor was protecting him— accepting the corrupted code within himself so it didn’t worsen Markus’s condition. He knows Connor’s advanced systems are more capable of dealing with the anomaly than his own shoddier ones, but Connor already had his own slew of troubled programs, he didn't need to be adding Markus’s corruption on top of it  _ again— _

“I’m being careful.” Connor promises, voice warped faintly by static as his body focused on their connection instead. Markus spares him a glance— briefly wondering when he’d closed his eyes— and sees Connor’s LED spinning a calm yellow. He wasn’t overloading himself like he’d done last time.

Markus still doesn’t like it. He should be able to fight his own battles, and he certainly shouldn’t have to burden Connor in order to lighten himself—

“Stop thinking so loud.” Connor admonishes him, pressing his lips against Markus’s temple and leaving them there. “Let me help.” A flood of warmth fills Markus’s chest, and experience alone tells him it’s Connor’s love manifesting physically. It’s the best kind of pain relief, and it contrasts so intensely with the spiking drum against his skull that he almost feels dizzy for it. He sags backwards into Connor’s hold some— he hadn’t realized how tense his entire body was— and let his head drop back into the crook of Connor’s neck. His left hand is finally released as Connor wraps both arms more firmly around him before giving him a little tug back up the bed. It takes some maneuvering, but eventually they are laying down again, wrapped around each other.

The pain is still there, draining at his mind and sucking all the life out of him, but it is muted and pushed to his background processes, and he finds himself getting relaxed again. Connor’s pulled a blanket over them and tucked him close, wrapped him thoroughly in mind and body.

He’s so fucking lucky.  _ God. _

With the pain properly muddled, he begins to think again, and his thoughts begin to stray back to the first time they’d done this— when Connor had not known his own limits and taken every falsified strand of code from Markus and loaded it onto himself instead. The relief had been instantaneous and wonderful, but it had frozen Connor’s systems for nearly ten minutes and forced him into a cascading error that had him rebooting twice later that morning. Markus had been a mixture of horrified and furious— Connor’s own selflessness and protectiveness over Markus could have seriously damaged him, and the conversation they’d had about it later that night had turned into a shouting match about the darker parts of their lives— e.g. the sacrifices they made for each other, and when everything tipped over the edge of too far.

In the end, Connor had gone over to Hank’s for the night, Markus had been distracted for the rest of the week, and they never found a middle ground of where enough was enough in regards to what they were willing to do for each other. The simple answer was “anything!”, but the realistic answer hurt far much worse.

Markus had meant to discuss it further. It was a conversation that they needed to have, but the memory of the shadows in Connor’s eyes that week still haunted him, and it never came up again.

Connor gives him a little squeeze. “Quit.”

Markus can’t help but sigh. “We need to talk about it.”

“Not until your system resources reach reasonable parameters again.”

“It’s a problem happening right now. We can’t put it off.”

“I’m being careful.”

“Careful for you or careful for me?” Markus asks him, voice a little harsher than he means it to be. He worms his way around until he can look at Connor’s face, pinning him under his gaze. Connor’s LED was still yellow, so he hadn’t overtaxed his processor yet. Good. “Because if you hurt yourself for me again, I’m going to be angry.” Anger isn’t quite the right word for it, but it’s the one that comes out of his mouth.

Connor glances at him before decidingly looking elsewhere.  _ “I’m being careful.” _

Markus recognizes the look in his eyes immediately— it was the look Connor got right before he shut out everything, when he deemed whatever emotions he was experiencing where more burdensome than helpful, and just... ignored them until he was calmer. It was upsetting and hard to break through once it set into place, and it always made Markus feel cold and alone. He hated it.

“Connor.” He watches the way Connor’s LED flashes red briefly, but he suspects it’s because he’s pushing him, and not because of the data dump— not yet anyway.

He should try something else. He should back off, yield, agree to back down. He should give him space, let Connor take care of him and unload the corrupted scripts, and talk about it later.

But he can’t stop thinking of how Connor had tripped into the countertop in their kitchen after the first cascading error all those months ago— how he’d gone horribly still and weak, trembled and shook while his systems fought to realign themselves. How he’d been hot the rest of the night and sat outside for a few hours to cool his components down— all because of Markus. All because he’d tried to help  _ Markus. _

_ All because of him. _

So, he doesn’t. He’s upset, and the pain is still twisting at his insides and making him feel jittery and hurting, and he can’t let Connor destroy himself because of him, he can't, he can’t—

_ “Connor—”  _ He doesn’t know what he was going to say to tell Connor this, but it doesn't matter because Connor doesn’t let him continue.

“If it were me—” Connor starts, voice dipped low and fierce. “If it were me. If our situations were switched— you wouldn’t just let me suffer. You would do the exact same thing that I’m doing now. Don’t act like you wouldn’t.” His grip on Markus tightens, even as the look in his eyes fogs over. Markus can feel the swirling mess of emotions in Connor’s connection, but Connor is keeping them pressed back behind a clear wall where they won’t overwhelm him. Protecting him.

Always protecting him.

It hurts. He doesn’t understand why. He’s not sure he wants to even know why.

He wonders for the first time if they are perhaps  _ too  _ close. If he feels Connor’s pain as if it’s his own, and vice versa— was it too much? Would they just end up hurt in the end anyway?

Just the implication of such a problem— that Connor’s presence in his life was anything but a blessing bestowed upon him from some nonexistent gods— is infinitely more upsetting.

He would take that hurt every day of his life, if it meant having Connor.

They couldn't ignore it— Markus couldn’t let Connor destroy himself just for him, but he would never give him up just to solve it. That wasn’t a solution— wasn’t an option.

Somehow their argument doesn’t seem so big anymore.

So, Markus sighs and pushes himself up before mashing his lips against Connor’s, kissing him fiercely as he moved to straddle his hips. Connor is surprised, hands hovering just above his skin as he blinked. He’d been prepared for a fight, and a moment later Markus felt his entire body deflate against their bed as all the tense energy he’d gathered slipped away. Their interface remains open, skin receding back in each place they touched as their minds continued to flow into one another.

“You’re right.” Markus tells him. “We’ll talk about it later. I don’t want to fight.”

Connor is still blinking at him, but he eventually nods. “Me neither.” His long fingers come up to rub gently at the back of Markus’s neck, fingers scratching gently at his scalp. The warmth in his chest redoubles, spreading out through his limbs and masking the pain of the incompatibility further. It had never gone away, Markus realizes, not even when Connor feared a shouting match.

Eventually they settle back down, and Markus rests his head on Connor’s chest while his partner takes care of him, shouldering the code and corruption so that Markus can rest and heal. He’ll probably be forced to take the day off tomorrow— the pain tended to linger and pull him back under if he didn’t take the time to let it run its course, and Connor wouldn’t let him worsen his condition.

There was a lot they’d need to talk about, from Connor’s tendency to disregard his own wellbeing to future replacement parts of Markus’s body— parts that didn’t try to tear him apart from the inside.

But it’s a problem for another day, and tonight they have each other.

**Author's Note:**

> PLease review!


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